51

SOUTHERN LEBANON

Al-Masri’s men had been traumatized by the Iranian president’s speech.

Yet after the shock of hearing that the Supreme Leader of the Shia world had died, they were electrified by the Sheikh’s message, cheering every line he uttered.

Gathered in the courtyard under camouflage netting al-Masri had ordered them to hang to obscure themselves from the prying eyes of drones and satellites, the men huddled around a transistor radio as they drank coffee and slapped each other on the back, congratulating one another and reveling in their glorious success.

They still had no idea what they were really doing. Not a one of them could have conceived that the border raid they had executed that morning—and the war they had triggered with the Israelis—had actually been in direct defiance of the Sheikh and his patrons in Tehran. To a man, they were convinced that they were obeying the last dying wish of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. And the Sheikh’s performance seemed to confirm that very point.

Al-Masri stood in the doorway to one of the abandoned bunkrooms. He enjoyed the sight of his men so deliriously happy. He enjoyed it almost as much as the sight of his three prisoners, chained to rusted flagpoles on the far end of the courtyard, bloodied and bruised and completely oblivious to what they were hearing on the radio.

Though he could never admit it to anyone, the Egyptian secretly wished he had thought of the whole thing himself. But the truth was it would never have occurred to him to give Hezbollah the credit for the operation. He certainly would never have thought of pretending to sell his hostages to the Sheikh, much less demanding the Sheikh broadcast his coup to the nation and the whole of the Islamic world. That had been pure Kairos from start to finish.

Al-Masri marveled at how effective the gambit had proven already. It was embarrassing the Little Satan, thus pouring gasoline on the war fires already raging with the Israelis. It was equally humiliating to the Great Satan, which had no idea what was really going on and was powerless to do anything about it anyway. And if any of his men had harbored the slightest doubts about why they were hiding out in an abandoned Hezbollah stronghold, not celebrating at Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut, the Sheikh’s speech had erased them completely. Al-Hussaini was singing the praise of these very men before the entire world, gloating about their “great victory for Allah.” Why would they have any reason to doubt him?

Still, al-Masri knew the truth. It was all a facade. In Beirut, the Sheikh knew the truth as well. At least he knew more of it than these men did. The Sheikh knew someone was playing him. He did not know who. He did not yet know why. And he was not going to take it lying down. Publicly he was playing along. Privately, however, al-Masri had no doubt the Sheikh was mobilizing his forty-five thousand Hezbollah fighters to hunt him down.

How long did he have to get these three Americans transferred out of the country and into the safekeeping of his Kairos patrons? Two days? Three? Certainly no more than a week, he calculated, and likely much less.

And then there was always the risk that one of his men had another mobile phone on him, one that he had not turned in, one that still gave him access to the outside world. Al-Masri was reasonably certain that wasn’t the case, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility. That would be a problem. A serious problem. These men were killers. That’s what they’d been born to do. That’s what they’d been trained to do. Al-Masri had trained them himself. But they didn’t kill for just anyone. Certainly not for him. They killed for the Sheikh. They killed for Ja’far ibn al-Hussaini because they believed that al-Hussaini spoke for the Supreme Leader in Tehran, and the Supreme Leader—or whoever would soon replace him—spoke for God. Al-Masri’s men listened to him because they believed he was the Sheikh’s hand-chosen man to lead this unit. If they thought for a moment that he was leading them astray, that he was going rogue, they would not hesitate to slit his throat while he slept.

Such were the advantages, al-Masri mused, of men with no cell phones, no computers, and no Wi-Fi. No means whatsoever of communicating with the high command—or with anyone else in the world—except through him. For the moment, his men knew nothing but what he told them. It was critical that he keep it that way for as long as possible.